Is it too much to suggest, in passing, that the phenomenon of the brilliant period, the curious clustering of great names in the bead-roll of history, may be explained as a moment when by a community of mind with mind, here at the basis of all thought, a fine individual clarity and a lively spontaneity of mutual understanding have lifted the current of ideas to a high level? At all events, by such community the capacity of the mind both to think and to learn is heightened and the ardour of thought is stimulated, expression meeting comprehension, and comprehension quickening the impulse to think. III I have gone a long way about and brought up with a conclusion that on its own showing should be as valid for modernism as for humanism. That, indeed, is my own sense of it--that here is the organic economy of thought in whatever field. And in fact, as I have intimated, its application is likely to be most obvious in the sciences, which we come upon after the mind is in some measure formed. Each science has a special articulation and nomenclature outside our normal experience, without which we can think but meagrely and vaguely in that area. The part they play there is evident. To these articulate particles it gives precise definition, at once for the sake of accuracy of calculation and for the sake of mutual understanding and wide co-operation among those who pursue it. Incidentally by its technology it escapes the loose corruptions with which lay usage always threatens a vernacular. The extraordinary results of the discipline which establishes these articulations, these precisions, and these communities need no bush. It is perhaps less obvious that discipline is even more imperative in that other area which the casual, voluble experience of living begins to articulate before we are aware, laying the premisses of that common mind which we tend to take for granted as a native gift. Though it is not a native gift, no man feels deficient in it, as Descartes pointed out. What it yields him is life as he knows it; it is his apprehension of reality. In one sense this trust is his intellectual virtue. It marks his faith in the judgments of reason--the best reason he knows. He may be aware of his ignorance in this or that field of knowledge--know that he knows nothing of astronomy, of Homer, of plumbing, of torts. But no one knows everything; these ignorances are comparable to those of other men; by turning his mind to them he could master them. By turning his mind! This contrast between _mind_, on the one hand, and on the other hand specific knowledge to which a _mind_ may be turned, is the very heart of the conflict between humanist and modernist. To the modernist, justifiably proud of his special methods, that mind which comes to him unaware is a casual and amateur affair. As a process of reason it is the way fools think, and asses, and the cohorts of stupidity. Well, it is.